Lone Locust Productions

Category: General

  • Taiwan (2024) – Day Four – Around the Lake

    Tuesday, October 8, 2024

    Up at 2:30 AM again and starving. The jet lag is not “sliding” towards normality like it usually does. At this rate, I won’t get on a normal sleep cycle until we leave.

    I had the instant noodles I purchased at 7-Eleven. One thing I love about instant noodles in Taiwan is that some of them contain actual fresh meat. And by “fresh,” I mean basically canned, like those meat products from Brazil that come in pouches. You empty the meat pouch into the noodles when you add the boiling water and the other ingredients. It was a decent 2:30 AM snack.

    You can tell when something is popular in an area in Taiwan because it dominates the retail space. Restaurants are always ubiquitous, but in the village near our hotel, bike rental shops were everywhere, and they’re all hungry for that sweet, sweet tourist money.

    Cute dinosaur sign

    The question is, how do you pick which one? I suggested the one with the cute dinosaur.

    Last evening and again this morning, as we walked or rode along the bike path, we noticed that about 50% of the bikes were eBikes, but nobody was pedaling them. They were all running throttle only. This offended my eBiker sensibilities, but I thought, perhaps, because Taiwan is a scooter-dominated society, maybe they just think of eBikes as small scooters.

    At 190 cm, finding a bike that fits me can be a problem, and while not a perfect fit, they had a brand new eBike that we could make work. It looked more like a small motorcycle, but it was a bike. Chuwan was much easier to fit, and she got a bike that looked just like the dozens we’d seen on the trail. It wasn’t exactly a two-person bike, but I had a seat on the back, presumably for a child to ride along.

    The bike path around Sun Moon Lake is broken up into two sections. 12 km is a dedicated, free-standing path, and 17 km is mixed-use with automobile traffic. This makes a total of 29 km around the lake, and since its all relatively flat, it should make for an easy eBike ride.

    Then, the disappointments began. “Oh no, these eBikes can’t ride all the way around the lake. The batteries won’t last.”

    “Besides, you’re not supposed to take them on the 17 km part of the path.”

    I looked at the bikes, I looked at the size of the batteries, and I put 26 years of experience with Taiwan in full gear in my head, and I told Chuwan, “That’s fine.”

    Because (A) OF COURSE, these bikes can ride 29 km on a single charge, and (B) no one ever obeys rules in Taiwan. We were going around the lake, and we wouldn’t tell the guy. If we got “caught,” we’d just look mildly embarrassed, say we got lost, and apologize. One thing worried us, though: We didn’t have a phone that we could dial up for help, just in case something did go wrong.

    A bike path stretches out across the water of a lake.

    We set off anti-clockwise around the lake, back towards our hotel, and we soon learned why no one was pedaling their eBikes.

    My bike was fine. In fact, it had a helluva kick to it. On my Rad eBike back home, when I’m riding leisurely, I often drop into PAS 3. This bike’s PAS 1 felt like PAS 3 on mine. It had a kick, as did the throttle. How much kick? I don’t know because the speedometer and odometer didn’t work. Did the battery gauge work? How was I to know? It never went down a single segment. Sometimes, it was clear that the cadence sensor got stuck, either on or off. The only thing that would free it was to gun the throttle. I was beginning to worry that this bike couldn’t make it around the lake on a charge.

    Chuwan’s bike was a different story. Similar to most of the other bikes being rented, with its odd two-seat but only one set of pedals design, the reason no one was pedaling was that the pedals were set too far back from the front seat. It was simply difficult and uncomfortable to pedal, and if you tried sitting on the back seat, you couldn’t reach the handlebars. It was throttle all the way for Chuwan, and we knew the battery would never make it around the lake like that.

    Bike path through the forest

    When we hit the visitor center, the path continued. We suspected that this was the beginning of the 17 km “no go” zone, but it was well-delineated, and we continued on. In places, we returned to dedicated bike infrastructure that took us far away from the road, but finally, we came to the stairs.

    In Taiwan, in the mountains, there are always stairs. Lots of them. Steep ones.

    These cement, damp, and moss-covered stairs also had a ramp next to them. This kind of ramp is used for walking bikes upstairs; however, the sign said to carry your bike up the stairs. It also forbade eBikes from going up the stairs.

    My concern wasn’t going up but coming down. I was not convinced we could safely walk the heavy eBikes back down the ramp without losing control of them on the slippery cement. Nonetheless, I walked up the steps, which twisted out of sight, to see what I thought. At the landing, I saw that the steps continued up and up, and I knew we had reached the end of the ride out.

    We could still return to the village and head clockwise in the other direction. By doing that, we’d fully travel the 12 km stretch in both directions for a 24 km ride.

    Left rank arm of a bike and the bolt that supposed to be holding it in place.

    About 2-3 km before we reached the village, I felt strange as my left foot pedaled. It felt strangely elliptical, but before I could figure out what had happened, the left crank arm fell off the bike. I found all the parts, but with no tools, the best I could do was bang the crank arm back onto the shaft. The bolt that held it in place had stripped and couldn’t be hand-threaded back on. I ran the bike back to the shop on throttle only.

    We probably could have gotten a replacement bike or a partial refund, but we’d had fun and didn’t feel the need to push anymore, so we returned the bikes and headed out for lunch. Lunch, for me, was another 7-Eleven hot dog, and we parked ourselves at an outdoor table to eat.

    Giant Bike Center

    Where we chose to eat made us regret our bicycle rental choice. We sat right in front of a large Giant cycle center. Giant is the Taiwanese brand of bikes, and while their lower-end models are manufactured in China, their high-end bikes are still made in Taiwan. Not only was this a full bicycle service center but also a showroom of some of the most gorgeous bikes I’ve seen in years. They both sold and rented bikes and eBikes, and even the rentals looked like they gave each one a complete hand wash and tuneup after every ride. I wish we’d spotted them first, but their location was absolutely crap.

    If you’re ever in Sun Moon Lake looking for a bike rental, look underneath the 7-Eleven at the main bus terminal.

    We went back to the hotel, and not for the first time, we took a gloriously long soak in the tub. This time, it was daylight, and the view from the tub was magnificent.

    In the evening, we grabbed a couple of the hotel’s bikes, rode into town, and found a restaurant advertising Japanese-style pork cutlets (tonkatsu). We had dinner there. After

    After dinner, we rode back in the dark, without lights. That was a bit harrowing, but the path was reasonably well-lit in most places.

    Motorcycle-like eBike

  • Taiwan (2024) – Day Three – Heading South

    Monday, October 7, 2024

    Today’s update should be quick, and relatively painless.

    Woke up at 2:30 AM, starving. Had some chips and went back to bed.

    At 7:00 AM, I didn’t even make a show of going to the hotel lobby for breakfast. I let Chuwan get her “free” food while I waited in the room. Afterward, we went to Sukiya. Sukiya is more or less a clone of Yoshinoya. Both are gyudon restaurants and, in fact, Sukiya was founded by a former employee of Yoshinoya. Sukiya now claims to be the largest gyudon chain, surpassing Yoshinoya. I make no statements as to the accuracy of these claims, but I can say this is the first I’ve seen or heard of them before this trip. Their expansion to Taiwan may be relatively recent.

    Three-cheese gyudon bowl with a side of karaage chicken

    I chose to be a bit bold, and rather than just getting a gyudon bowl, I went with a three-cheese gyudon bowl. This was good, although if I were choosing the three cheeses, parmesan would not be one of them.

    My “combo” meal also came with some karaage chicken. All told, it was a good, hearty breakfast for the day’s adventures.

    Melz has school at NTNU five days a week, so they could not join us on our mini-vacation. Visiting family in Taipei is fine, but if you’re coming here, get the fuck out of Taipei and see the country.

    This time, we chose Sun Moon Lake. We’ve been there before. The first time was back in early 1999. This was just a few months before the 921 Earthquake (Sept 21, 1999) which basically levelled the area, killing 2,500 people and injuring over 11,000 people. The epicenter was very nearby.

    We saw the area again afterward, and it was devastated, with collapsed buildings all around the lake. I can report that they’ve rebuilt and improved the area considerably since then.

    Why did we choose Sun Moon Lake? We have, pretty much, been to every place in Taiwan over the years, so some recycling is inevitable. Sun Moon Lake was a simple, easy to obtain destination, and it has been many, many years since we were last there.

    There was another reason. In the years since I first started coming to Taiwan, bicycling has taken off immensely. From non-existent infrastructure to round-the-island bike routes, the transformation has been incredible. There is a YouTube channel called Taiwan Plus, and they’ve been producing a series about bike rides around Taiwan. I watched one about the round-the-lake ride around Sun Moon Lake, and at only 29 KM and flat, it was a simple enough ride that we could rent bikes (maybe even eBikes) and make the circuit (even if we just puttered along and took all day.)

    But we had to get there first. Like all things coming into this trip, Supertyphoon Krathon had originally looked like it was going to roll right over Sun Moon Lake which is in the central mountains. The mountains in Taiwan are steep. (Unimaginably steep and so densely vegetated that I have never been able to get a picture that adequately conveys how damned steep the mountains are. They’re largely impassable and often rise at angles of nearly 80-85º. Typhoons bring on major landslides and block roads and communities for days or weeks at a time. Luckily, Krathon missed Sun Moon Lake.

    Near our hotel was a sandwich shop claiming to be Taiwan’s No. 1 Sandwich. Called Hung Rui Chen, there are epic tales online of people buying these sandwiches to take home to Korea, Japan, and other countries. (There’s also a less-than-reassuring story about hundreds of people getting food poisoning from an outlet location in Hong Kong, but I’m just going to blame that on the Red Chinese’s lack of health and safety standards and try to ignore it.)

    A ham and cheese sandwich

    These sandwiches are not to be believed. They are ham and cheese on crustless white bread, I kid you not. In any case, I picked up two for the train ride to Taichung.

    Are they any good? Well, sure, it was fine. The bread was really light and fresh, but… it’s just a packaged ham and cheese sandwich. What was I supposed to expect? The weirdest things get “famous” in Taiwan.

    The train ride to Taichung was via the High Speed Rail (HSR). I cannot gush enough about the HSR. It’s fantastic, fast, comfortable, easy to navigate. It’s great.

    Why do people always resist them when they’re being built?

    Less wonderful was the hour-long bus ride up the mountain from Taichung to Sun Moon Lake. With cramped, uncomfortable seats and a suspension that meant every movement of the wheels was felt in your butt.

    Until this point, we’d not had any trouble with our cellular provider, but the quality got bad on the trip up the mountain.

    Perhaps I should explain. During my last trip to Taiwan, eSIMS weren’t a thing, or at least they hadn’t caught on yet. My previous phone had a physical SIM and space for one eSIM, but I never got to test it. On prior trips, we had to replace our SIMs with physical SIMs from a local provider, and these had gotten increasingly difficult to obtain.

    On the first trip, when we got SIMs, we walked into 7-Eleven and picked up prepaid ones from a shelf. On the second trip, 7-Eleven still had them but wouldn’t sell them to people without a household registration (i.e., foreigners.) We had to go to a cellular phone shop and apply. It got harder for us as foreigners on each trip, although, in theory, foreigners can get SIMs at the airport when they arrive; however, they aren’t open 24 hours, and we never arrive when they’re open.

    With the advent of eSIMs, there are now a plethora of apps in the iOS App Store where you can purchase eSIMs for your trips before leaving home. Listening to some recommendations and going with what seemed like the best deal for our trip, we selected Holafly.

    For this trip, we selected 15 days of unlimited data. The downside, however, is you don’t get a local phone number. Would this be a problem? Chuwan’s family can call her via Line. We can call each other via FaceTime. I can talk with friends at home via iMessage, except for those poor, benighted souls with Android phones, and for them, I can use my Google voice number.

    But what about if someone in Taiwan needs your phone number, or you need to call a business in Taiwan? Would that be a problem? We weren’t sure, but we decided we’d risk it.

    Taiwan has amazing cellular coverage, island-wide, and it wasn’t clear why we kept losing the signal. We’d have 5 bars of 5G in one moment, and 10 seconds later, it would be gone. The mountains are steep, and the road is winding, but there seemed to be no rhyme nor reason to the spotty coverage.

    When we arrived at the small village of Sun Moon Lake, we found the first drawback: We couldn’t call the hotel to ask for a shuttle to pick us up. We could have re-engaged our Verizon coverage and called from our US phone number, but that automatically incurs a $10/day charge, and Chuwan wouldn’t have that.

    Two people walking along a road.

    We walked the 1 km to the hotel, hauling our luggage.

    It’s Day Three, and my back is still killing me. The flight really did a number on me, and walking slowly or standing still is the worst. It doesn’t take long for it to become unbearable. I have meds that can ease the pain, but I don’t like taking them all the time, day in and day out.

    We got to the hotel, and it was time for a nap.

    The hotel we stayed at was the Sun Moon Lake Hotel, and it was fantastic! (Make sure you get a lake view.) Our room was a Japanese-style room with a living/dining area, two large beds, and a giant soaking tub with views out onto the lake. The hotel is right alongside the lakeside bike pathway, and they offer bikes to the guests for free use.

    Japanese-style Hotel Room

    While the freebie bikes were well-used and not in the best of shape, we took a couple of them into the village and grabbed dinner from the 7-Eleven. This time, I tried a three-cheese hot dog, and the addition of the cheese actually helped mask the odd “wrong meat” flavor of the dog. I also grabbed an instant noodle for later on.

    Had a very long, and very welcome to my back, soak in the tub, and turned in for the night, hoping I’d sleep through till morning.

  • Taiwan (2024) – Day Two – The Day We Ate Pizza

    Sunday, October 6, 2024

    You might want to go back and read my Prelude to Day Two to understand my motivations for the day: Avoid spending time with my in-laws.

    I'm writing this snippet on Day Six. I've been writing this account of Day Two since Day Two, and I wouldn't say I like it.  I mean, I actively hate it. It doesn't flow. Nothing happens. It's boring. I feel like I've set it up to be epic, but it wasn't.  I'm sorry. I'm going to finish writing it anyway. You can come back for Day Three if you like, maybe it will be better.

    I cannot speak Chinese, but I understand more than they think I do. Yesterday, I heard them planning to feed me pizza, despite the fact that they don’t like pizza, and it would not be pizza I liked. My wife was urging them not to do it. They weren’t listening.

    This gave me nearly 24 hours to plan an exit strategy.

    Dammit, my in-laws prefer eating Chinese food. My wife has returned to Taiwan so she can eat real Chinese food that she cannot get in Arizona. Don’t fucking plan your meals around me!

    Go eat what you want, be together, do all that talking in Chinese that I cannot understand (or at least participate in) and don’t worry about me. I’m a grown man, I can feed myself, and I can amuse myself without relying on the company of others.

    You’re not offending me. You’re not hurting my feelings. You’re making me feel bad because you aren’t enjoying yourselves.

    And we simply cannot get that through to them.

    But that’s not how Day Two began. It began by waking up at 3:00 AM, starving. I used the opportunity to write up my Day One blog, and then, around 6:00 AM I realized I wasn’t going back to sleep, I decided to have another soaking bath.

    …and I promptly fell asleep in the tub, again. This time for over an hour. At least it was finally time to go out and get some breakfast. There’s a 24-hour Yoshinoya in the area, I could get a gyudon bowl. There’s plenty of green onion pancake vendors. There’s a place nearby that makes a mean plate of spaghetti for breakfast. There’s omurice. There are loads of neat things to eat in the area.

    Oh no. We couldn’t have that. Our room comes with free breakfast buffet, and that’s what my wife insisted on having. We’re not wasting that money!

    The buffet was some very unappetizing looking buns, oddly pale fruits, gruel, and various forms of pork lint. My wife saw what was on offer and looked at me, “There’s a 7-Eleven nearby. We can go there afterward.”

    …and so I had toast at the buffet before heading to FamilyMart for food. (Turn left out the door of the hotel, you hit 7-Eleven, turn right, you hit FamilyMart.)

    Breakfast at FamilyMart was a hot dog. I’m guessing it was pig. I certainly wasn’t cow, chicken, or that unique, delectable blend of mystery meat so common in low-end dogs.

    On my first trip to Taiwan in ’98, I got very ill, and I still needed to build up a repertoire of Taiwanese food I could eat. Recovering, I was still feeling like crap, and we were out somewhere a little less urban, and I was starving, and we came across a 7-Eleven, and they had a hot dog. It was like a light from heaven shining down on me as I bought that dog and hastily devoured what, to this day, I’ll still describe as the worst hot dog I’ve ever eaten. I have not had a convenience store hot dog in Taiwan since then, until today.

    This was still weird but wasn’t inedible, and it came with what seemed like a damned clever half-mustard, half-ketchup packet for the dog. Now, to be clear, ketchup doesn’t belong on a hot dog, and that’s a hill I’ll die on, but I can acknowledge ingenuity when I see it.

    A combined packet of ketchup and mustard

    That is until I realized that the packet is designed to open both halves and dispense both together, either depriving the dog of the essential mustard or ruining it with ketchup. It was a tough choice. I tried circumventing the pouch and ended up with mustard on the hot dog and ketchup on my hands.

    While eating breakfast, Melz and I conspired to avoid being at the in-laws’ house all day.

    Taipei has a couple of underground shopping malls, and just before leaving, I saw that a new one had recently opened at the newly completed Taipei Dome. We headed there but were very disappointed. It was very empty, and most of the shops and restaurants were closed.

    We decided to go to one of the older ones near Zhongxiao Fuxing station. We spent some time there and didn’t find anything interesting, and still, several shops were closed. Yes, it was Sunday but I’ve never noticed that being an issue before.

    We decided to go into Sogo (a Department store located at the same station), and even that was weird. Security guards were everywhere, and the store escalators were cordoned off, save for the underground food court. At one point, a security guard followed us to help us leave.

    We took the hint and decided to go elsewhere.

    Melz wanted to buy a belt but didn’t want to buy it at the big department stores because they tend to be expensive. We decided to try Uniqlo, which was pretty close, but that’s when we realized they opened at 11:00 AM, and it was only 10:55 AM.

    Could it be that the other places didn’t open till 11:00 AM, too?

    The nearest Uniqlo was in the Breeze Center, and we struck out looking for a belt – at least a belt that fits. We did find some gifts for folks back home, so the trip wasn’t wasted, and it was now lunchtime, and also my back was killing me. It hadn’t recovered from the flight, yet. I needed to sit down for a while.

    Knowing that we were avoiding being at the house so that the in-laws wouldn’t order pizza, I decided we were going to go have pizza, but, and this was the important part, we could never tell them where we went!

    We went to Pizza Rock, a small Taiwan-based chain set up by a foreigner. I heard about it just before we left Taiwan on the last trip but never got to try it.

    Let’s start by saying I’m incredibly proud of my kid. Not long ago, Melz wouldn’t special order food in a restaurant that wasn’t explicitly printed on the menu, yet here they were, ordering pizza in Mandarin. I was really moved at how far they’ve come.

    Bonus: Pizza Rock sells Dr Pepper, which is damned rare in Taiwan, and an extra treat for Melz and me.

    The damage done to my back by the plane flight continued to bother me, and walking the streets wrecked me for the rest of the day. I returned to the hotel for a long nap.

    Later that night Chuwan and I met up with Melz again, originally to go for a curry katsu, but somehow ended up having Bafang dumplings. 25 potstickers and a bowl of soup all for under $US 7. Taiwan can be very economical.

    Train trip tomorrow.

  • Taiwan (2024) A Tale of Six Hamburgers (Prelude to Day Two)

    Before I tell you the tale of Day Two, let me recount something that happened 22+ plus years ago. This will inform you about my frame of reference when eating with my in-laws.

    We arrived in Taiwan, battered and bedraggled after the flight, as usual. On the first day, it’s obligatory that we eat together as a family. Back then, there were six of us, including my brother-in-law, Johnny, and his then-girlfriend.

    Unilaterally, they had decided that I’d appreciate hamburgers since I was an American. It didn’t matter that none of them liked hamburgers. We were having hamburgers for my benefit. (For the record, I love a good bacon cheeseburger, so this isn’t immediately problematic.)

    Johnny had identified a new hamburger place that served real, American-style hamburgers.

    When we arrived, my wife was told that when Johnny and his girlfriend arrived, we’d have hamburgers, and she was told a little bit about this great new place that served real, American-style hamburgers.

    My wife relayed this information to me and, I thought, “That sounds damned nice of them. We go to a hamburger place, and I can pick out a burger and, even if it isn’t really a ‘real, American-style hamburger’ I’ll get by and probably even enjoy it.”

    Before I finish this story, let me say that this story turns out well. I had a great bacon cheeseburger, which really was American-style. But it very nearly was a burger disaster.

    We did not go out to eat burgers. When Johnny arrived, he brought the burgers. There were six of us, so he ordered six hamburgers off their menu more or less at random.

    The burgers, still in their packaging, were placed on the table and everyone — remember that burgers really weren’t their thing – just grabbed one from the pile at random.

    At first, I reeled in shock that “random burger” was the modus operandi of the day, then I reeled in horror at some of the abominations that were included in the stack. I cannot even remember what some of them were, they were too horrific to commit to long-term memory. I’d probably have PTSD to this day if I had.

    I got lucky. Not only was one of the burgers (towards the bottom) a bacon cheeseburger, but I was able to grab it and not appear like I was desperately trying to grab the only “burger” there that I’d eat.

    I’m picky, I know it, I’ve made peace with it.

    I hate the fact that they try so hard to be nice and accommodate me, and I’m a picky-assed eater, who has a very limited capacity to “choke it down.” That’s on me.

    Yet at the same time, they’d never think to actually ask me what I’d like. They feel obligated to anticipate and present me with something I’ll love.

    We’ve had over 25 years of this dance, and I’ve developed coping mechanisms to avoid the problems when possible, and my wife helps facilitate them, because we’re a team.

    Whether you look at this scenario and think, “oh god, that’s a crime against humanity,” “that seems completely normal to me,” or perhaps you take some position in between, this is nonetheless what I have to navigate as best I can while trying to save face all around.

    Now we can discuss Day Two.

  • Five “Interesting” Things About Me

    Once in a while, I’ll get drawn into one of those things going around social media where somebody does a thing, then challenges everyone who sees it to do the same. Recently on the Fediverse someone posted such a thing where you describe five interesting things about yourself.

    Considering that I have always had a raging ego and have had six decades to do interesting things, I was surprised of how I could not think a single interesting thing about myself.

    I realized maybe I should try to rise to this particular challenge, if only for my own self-aggrandizement.

    I’ve chosen to stick with things from my first 20 to 30 years. This list has taken me days and, perhaps, says more about me than I originally expected.

    Whether anyone else finds these things interesting remains to be seen.

    In no particular logical order:

    1. I Read the 1954 Encyclopædia Britannica Cover-to-Cover
    2. My Moral Compass (and My Sideburns) Were Shaped Almost Exclusively by Star Trek
    3. I Wish I’d Adopted the Metric System Earlier Because My Knees Might Be Better Today
    4. I Owe My Career to Greenbar Fanfold Paper, BBS Software, Dumb Luck, and Because Snow Sucks
    5. I Hate Writing

  • “Interesting” 5: I Hate Writing…

    …but once I get started…

  • “Interesting” 4: I Owe My Career to Greenbar Fanfold Paper, BBS Software, Dumb Luck, and Because Snow Sucks

    Since there was no practical way I would ever be a starship captain (my preferred career path) I spent a fair amount of my childhood with no clue or direction on what I wanted to be “when I grew up.” (Arguably, I’ve gotten around that by never growing up.)

    By the time I reached high school, I had begun to get an idea what I wanted to be, or at least I had narrowed it down to three things.

    Foremost, I wanted to be a forest ranger.

    When I was younger, we spent a lot of time camping, and I always had good interactions with the rangers. They gave nature talks, were usually friendly and helpful, were paid to be camping, and seemed to enjoy what they were doing. And they got to spend all summer in the pine forests. Who wouldn’t want to do that?

    That idea got nixed when I discovered a few things about the job. Not all forests are pine forests, rangers have to help fight forest fires, and they have to stay in the forest when the winter snows1 come.

    Forest Ranger was a no-starter. Snow sucks.

    Second, I wanted to be a vertebrate paleontologist, and I was particularly fascinated by pre-Holocene Cenozoic and Permian life. (Yeah, I got that fascination from reading the Encyclopædia Britannica.) I mean, what’s not to love? Spending all your time camping in places almost invariably called “the badlands” and digging in the dirt. Most importantly, you can’t really do that in the snow. (Probably, I hoped.)

    Then I learned the brutal reality of paleontology. We don’t live in the United Federation of Planets. Science isn’t funded or valued by our society, and paleontology isn’t even near the top of the sciences that get funded.

    Only a handful of paleontologists were actually out doing digs in the 1980s, and even those were often punctuated by long gaps of years between expeditions. Paleontologists spent all their time teaching at universities or sometimes curating at museums.

    I have the most tremendous respect for anyone who takes up teaching as a profession, but y personality makes this an absolutely unsuited career for me. Paleontology fell by the wayside.

    This left only my third and least-preferred choice: computer programming.

    You might think I got my interest for programming from Star Trek, but I did not. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the computers kind of suck in Star Trek, and are often, for want of a better word, evil. Think M5 or Landru.

    No, what got me interested in computers was a full box of wide-carriage, green bar, fanfold paper that my dad was given by someone, which he, in turn, gave to me. I may have been wasting too much paper trying to draw the USS Enterprise, and this would be a lot of big paper that I could waste that he didn’t have to pay for.2

    Instead, I found it endlessly fascinating.

    Sure, it was great to draw on, but why was it all stuck together? Why were there holes on the sides? What a cool idea these micro-perforations are to make it easy to tear! Isn’t it cool to tear those end pieces off in huge strips and use them for art projects? These green stripes are fantastic for drawing straight lines! I fell in love with that paper.

    My fascination with computers started there, and I was able to parlay that enthusiasm into convincing my dad to buy me a Radio Shack TRS-80 when they came out. (No printer green bar printer, though.)

    I taught myself to program, first by getting books and magazines with TRS-80 programs in them and later by doing the same with Apple II programs and porting them to the TRS-80. (That wasn’t always possible.) I went to university to earn a degree in Computer Science. Then, things went wrong.

    I’m going to partially (and probably unfairly) blame Star Trek for this, too. Perhaps being a little too invested in a fictional world that embraced post-scarcity economics may have caused me to be a little less than frugal with my savings when I moved out.

    My first IBM PC cost me $5,000, or about 20% of my savings at the time. I bought it to use it as a terminal so I could dial into the ASU data center (at 300 baud) and do my homework. ASU school work was done on a series of multiuser mini-computers, like PDPs back then. I also had ambitions of learning to program it.

    (ASU had two or three rooms with DecWriters for doing computer classwork, but it was virtually impossible to get in and do work during daylight hours. Until I bought the computer, I often went in at 3:00 AM to get a terminal and work in peace.)

    There were other less practical expenses, such as my quite impressive collection of albums on cassette tape and repairs to not one, but two Triumph TR7s that I owned.

    I wasted my savings.

    Nonetheless, I had a reliable, steady income from the United States Government in the form of my mother’s Social Security Benefits. And then that fucking fucker Ronald fucking Reagan eliminated those, and I was incomeless. (It’s more complicated than that, but let’s leave it there for this narrative.)

    Feeling that I was only partway through my degree and, in my mind, probably unemployable in the computer trade, I got a break from a friend who helped get me a job alongside him at an electrical contracting company. It was manual labor, but it paid (barely) the bills.

    The good thing for me is that electrical wiring is just the simplest, most rudimentary form of programming, so I was able to pick up and understand what the journeyman electricians were doing in days. I was able to study the electrical code book at home, and then move from one contractor to another (lying about my experience along the way.)

    Meanwhile, I had that “fancy” IBM PC (with dual double-side floppy discs, no less!) and what it was doing was… being used as a terminal to log onto local BBSs. Based on some of the sysops that I encountered, I thought, “If those people can do, I certainly can,” and began my preparations.

    I cannot remember why I chose the Fido BBS software. Maybe it was because I could run it on a dual-floppy PC, maybe it was because of the chatter amongst my online friends. Several of us were setting up to run Fidos, but there were still obstacles, not the least of which was that there was no room at the inn.

    FidoNet, the interconnected messaging system between Fido BBSs, had a programmatic limit of 2503 nodes… and they were all taken.

    John Kerr was the local sysop who had one of the actual numbers, and he was a really nice, helpful guy. He knew that “coming soon” Fido would be expanding to a Net/Node configuration that would allow new BBSs and he worked to coordinate with locals who wanted to get in on FidoNet.

    When the day came and Phoenix’s network, FidoNet Net 114, was born, John doled out node numbers in no particular order that I’m aware of. I was officially 114/12 The Crunchy Frog BBS – a discussions-only BBS, with a bent towards Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

    That’s the unimportant part, though. The important part is that the collective sysops of Net 114 interacted and networked with each other and became friends. There was a sysop who was formerly of Texas Instruments and became my roommate, and I learned how to tear apart my PC and rebuild it from him. There was a sysop who was a higher-up electrician at the Palo Verde Nuclear plant; he got me a better electrician’s job through his connections (not at the nuclear plant.) Then, there was the sysop, who ran a computer company selling electrical estimation software to contractors. When the contractor I was working for ran out of work, I started helping at the computer company. I knew computers, I knew programming, I knew how to troubleshoot computers, I understood how electricians worked and knew the electrical building code, and I fucking knew how to fucking talk to fucking electrical contractors because I was one of fucking them.

    That’s when I realized how much I actually knew about computers and PCs in particular.

    Once I understood that my computer knowledge and experience were practical (because universities hadn’t caught up to PCs yet) and marketable, I moved onwards and upwards. First, doing technical support and networking jobs4, then programming, and finally, project management and upper management. (Free tip: Don’t do upper management. Upper management sucks.)

    While in management at my last employer, I oversaw the surplusing of our last wide-carriage green bar printer. I almost shed a tear.

    1I hate snow.

    2I couldn’t draw then; I can’t draw now.

    3My memory of what was going on at this point could be better. I feel like something else was going on, and the Wikipedia article didn’t really clear it up for me.

    4Remind me to tell you someday about when I went to work as a network support tech but caught their programmer defrauding the company on my first day. By 5:00 PM I had his job and a raise.

  • “Interesting” 3: I Wish I’d Adopted the Metric System Earlier Because My Knees Might Be Better Today

    This is actually about bicycles, not the metric system. I’m not going to drone on about my position that we should just all say, “fuck it,” and start using the metric system exclusively and damn the retrograde cavemen all to hell if they can’t keep up.

    My dad and I shared a love for sports cars. We used to have many books on them, talked about them a lot, and went to car shows to gawk at them. Despite that, as I moved into my high school years, I had little or no desire to learn to drive a car. (When I finally learned to drive, it was on a 1963 Porsche 356B. Take that, mudanes!)

    I had read somewhere that the bicycle was the single most efficient machine for converting human energy into motion, and considering how tiring it was to ride my AMF Huffy 10-Speed to school, I had my doubts, but then I learned that there were differences in the quality of bikes. I convinced my dad to take me to a large bike store in Tucson.

    After a good hour or so of talking with the “bike guy” at the shop, I convinced my dad to buy me a Centurian Super LeMans, a decent starter roadbike.

    I never rode it to school because I was afraid of bike theft, but if the days were long enough (and it didn’t conflict with Star Trek reruns), I’d always get in an hour’s ride after school and several hours on weekends and school holidays.

    There were no satnavs to measure distance in those days. You either installed an odometer on your bike, which reduced efficiency, or you worked it out on a map. I soon wanted to know how far I was riding, so I began to come home from my rides, measure them on the map, and then log them.

    Not my Fuji America, but appears to be the same model and color. Blue road bike, light blue highlights, with chrome around the stays.

    In my first full year, I hit almost 8,000 miles or about an average of 21 miles a day. This was actually enough to convince my dad that riding bicycles wasn’t just a passing fad for me, so he helped me buy a newer, better touring bike. My new bicycle was a beautiful blue, hand-detailed Fuji America, which was still manufactured in Japan in those days. It was a dream to ride, and an absolutely perfect frame size and geometry fit for me. It immediately increased my average speed with the same amount of work, increasing my daily distance.

    And then I got a crazy idea. If I can do 8,000 miles in a year without really trying on a lesser bike, why not set my sights on an even 12,000 miles per year? (I picked that number because 1,000/month appealed to my sense of aesthetics and nothing more.)

    I wasn’t in training for anything. I didn’t have any goals or ambitions. I just really enjoyed being alone with my thoughts on the road. I hit my numbers, but it was tough, and it had its toll on me. I couldn’t get enough miles on weekdays, so I had to make it up on the weekends. I would frequently be out all day, and summer temperatures in Tucson were no picnic, even back in the 80s. Sometimes, I’d have to make up a month’s shortfall in the next month… or even the next.

    Even after a year of it, I would come home absolutely exhausted. I drank a lot of Gatorade. I hate Gatorade now.

    As I’ve gotten older, I’ve noticed the parts of me wearing out first are my knees and my neck, consistent with where the strain was riding my bike back then.

    If I had been using the metric system all along, that first year would have been roughly 12,500 km (because I was using a map to estimate). I wouldn’t have decided I needed to hit a higher goal, and if I did, it probably would have been an aesthetically pleasing 15,000 km, or only 78% of what I actually did.

    I regret not switching to the Metric System earlier. The Metric System saves knees.

    My knees hurt just thinking about this.

  • “Interesting” 2: My Moral Compass (and My Sideburns) Were Shaped Almost Exclusively by Star Trek

    I suspect this list shall bear witness to the fact that I can be both obsessive and compulsive. In first grade, my dad received a quarter-end report card with a note from my teacher saying, “Gene1 could be a fantastic student if he could just not fixate on Batman all the time.”

    It’s true. I was obsessed with the Adam West/Burt Ward Batman series, and it wasn’t even on TV anymore! I got banned from all things Batman over that one.

    I switched my attention to Star Trek.

    Younger readers may not be able to grok the concept that when I say Star Trek, I mean Star Trek proper — the series that the young’uns today improperly refer to as “TOS.” There was no other.

    As Star Trek reached the point where it was airing every single weekday, I was there for it every single time. I have no concept of how many times I’ve watched every episode of Star Trek. A hundred? Maybe. Maybe more.

    I knew them line for line and word for word, backward and forward.

    Star Trek was more insidiously invasive on me than Batman. It showed me what the world should be. In many ways, particularly in my pre-teen years, I think I believed it was the way the world really was. If nothing else, I thought it was what everyone was striving to achieve.

    Star Trek indelibly imprinted my baseline moral compass on me without me realizing it. It may be simplistic and pollyannaish, but I believe that science and exploration are good, the search for knowledge makes us better and more prosperous, wars are bad, violence is only justified in defense, men and women and people of all colors and races (even Scotsmen!) can live and work together without prejudice, bad laws should sometimes be broken (I’m looking at you Prime Directive), and that you should never turn weapons over to a super-computer.

    Looking back on Star Trek from the 21st century, there are still many problematic things in its depiction of the world that were a product of its time, but that’s true for everyone’s view of things if you live long enough. We must all grow, but I think Star Trek provided me with a pretty solid foundation.

    Oh, and sideburns.

    I am oblivious to fashion unless it rises to the level of the absurd. I don’t see it, and I don’t care; however, I would be lying — no, I would be deluding myself — to say I am not, at least subconsciously, influenced by the things around me.

    In the mid-80s, I was quite poor, languishing in my ambitions to work in the computer field, and surviving by working manual labor as an electrician. I’d been on the job for six months to a year (and had learned how to curse really fucking well by then), and one day, we were sitting on a job site, having lunch from the roach coach, when one of the guys made a light-hearted crack about my “pointy-assed Star Trek sideburns.”

    I had no clue what he was talking about until I looked around at everyone else there and, indeed, every other man I saw after that point. None of them had neatly trimmed pointy sideburns. Clearly, the world was mad.

    When I started shaving, I had just simply adopted what I had seen and normalized a thousand times before and trimmed my sideburns like the crew of the Enterprise. I had no clue that was an affectation for TV to show that hairstyles in the future were different.

    I didn’t go home and shave them off that day, but I did, slowly over the course of a couple weeks, continue to trim them at a less rakish angle until they were “normal.”

    A little bit of joy and individuality2 died in the world that day.

    1My name of record is Eugene. My parents called me Gene, so the schools and whatnot also called me Gene. I always disliked it. When we moved to Oracle, AZ, in 1975, I just started going by Eugene from that point forward.

    2Arguably, that’s not individuality since I was copying someone else. You decide.

  • “Interesting” 1: I Read the 1954 Encyclopædia Britannica Cover-to-Cover

    A 1950s vintage Encyclopædia Britannica set, within a bespoke bookshelf.

    When my dad returned from the Korean War, he used the GI Bill to attend university, first studying Geology and then switching to Law. As a “Going to University Present,” my grandparents bought him a complete set of the 1954 Encyclopædia Britannica1. It was a bookshelf-worth of books (in fact, it came with a bookshelf, a giant Atlas of the World, and several “Book of the Year” updates for a few years).

    After he left university, he was a bit footloose, carefree, and not at all bogged down with personal possessions. He prided himself on not having more possessions than would fit in his Triumph T3, so those books went back to my grandparents. After my mother died in the late ’60s, my grandparents moved in with us. Those books and that bookshelf came with them and ended up in my room, where they remained until I moved to university in the early ’80s.

    Sometime during elementary school, I decided I needed to absorb that knowledge (It’s what Spock would do), so I got myself a bookmark and started from Volume 1, Page 1. Slowly, day by day, I worked through every volume, article, and plate. I can still feel that curiously thin paper between my fingers, the thick, glossy photo plates, and I can still smell those books.

    It took years to complete the task. It’s not a gripping read.

    The author(s) didn’t manage to weave together a coherent plot and huge swaths didn’t interest me at all. Many subjects that did interest me were boring as hell, I’m sure there was much I read and didn’t absorb, and much of it was horribly out-of-date, but it was knowledge for knowledge’s sake, which was good enough for me (and Spock).

    I don’t claim to have an “encyclopedic memory,” but I have a legit leg up on one. Did I do myself a disservice by reading an encyclopedia already at least 20 years out-of-date? I’ll never know.

    1I’m not exactly sure what “year” you’d call this set. 1954 is an estimate. The Fourteenth Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica was published from 1929 to 1973 and had what they called a “continuous revision” policy. This set would have been roughly current when my dad went to university in 1954, and we had several Book of the Years going up to 1957 (IIRC).